Volume 23, Number 3 · March 4, 1976
The Malraux Show
By John Russell
André Malraux
by Jean Lacouture, translated by Alan Sheridan
Pantheon, 510 pp., $12.95
Malraux's Heroes and History
by James W. Greenlee
Northern Illinois University Press, 222 pp., $12.50
Hôtes de Passage
by André Malraux
Gallimard, 236 pp., 29F (paper)
Lazare
by André Malraux
Gallimard, 253 pp., 29F (paper)
La Tête d'obsidienne
by André Malraux
Gallimard, 279 pp., 38F (paper)
It was difficult to be very young in the European summer of 1938 and not feel about André Malraux as Henry James felt about James Russell Lowell: that he was 'the poet of pluck and purpose and action' who 'commemorated all manly pieties and affections.' Malraux at that time radiated a high-souled masculinity. Where others talked, he acted. Where others thought of writing, he wrote. He was the nonpareil of the decade, the admired of all admirers; it was difficult to carry a new-minted copy of his L'Espoir from one end of a Parisian street to the other without making a friend on the way. That book moved a generation as perhaps no novel has moved one since; and those who were nineteen and in Paris at the time still find it hard to think ill of André Malraux.
Review, 4820 words
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